Zaha Hadid Wins Stirling Prize With $207 Million Rome Museum

Architect Zaha Hadid poses at the opening of her first exhibition in the U.K., at the Design Museum in Shad Thames, in London's Docklands, Thursday, June 28, 2007. Photographer: Graham Barclay/Bloomberg News

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect
who has lived for some four decades in the U.K., finally won
recognition from her country of adoption as she clinched the
U.K.’s RIBA Stirling Prize for her MAXXI Museum in Rome.

British acclaim had so far evaded Hadid, 59, who in 2004
became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for
Architecture, her profession’s highest distinction. She had been
nominated three other times for the Stirling, the U.K.’s top
architecture award, and lost every time.

Hadid collected her prize at a gala dinner inside the
Roundhouse arts center in Camden, London. Her five competitors
included David Chipperfield for his Neues Museum in Berlin, and
Rick Mather Architects for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

“It’s really very exciting for me to receive a British
prize, for a change,” said Hadid, who wore a trapezoidal yellow
tunic and black gloves, and was flanked by colleagues Patrik
Schumacher and Gianluca Racana.

MAXXI, built on the site of a former army barracks, took 10
years and 150 million euros ($207 million) to complete. It was
designed in 1999: Rome wanted its own contemporary-art museum at
a time when London’s Tate Modern and the Guggenheim in Bilbao,
Spain, were opening.

In her acceptance speech, Hadid said that working in Rome
was “very difficult.” She regretted the absence at the
ceremony of the museum’s Italian director, because of a passport
loss. “It’s a confirmation of the Italian-ness of this
project,” she said.

Mature Architecture

The judges described MAXXI as “a mature piece of
architecture, the distillation of years of experimentation, only
a fraction of which ever got built.”

“It is perhaps her best work to date,” they said.

Made of gray concrete, MAXXI has an undulating facade and a
jutting tower that recalls London’s Hayward Gallery. Inside, it
has swerving white walls and display “suites” that flow into
one another, creating a curving maze where visitors can meander.

Judges called it “the quintessence of Zaha’s constant
attempt to create a landscape as a series of cavernous spaces
drawn with a free, roving line.” They awarded her practice a
20,000 pound check.

The Stirling Prize goes to a project that is either built
in the U.K. or by a practice based in Britain. Previously, Hadid
failed to win it with the Nord Park Cable Railway in Austria
(2008), the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany (2006),
and the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany (2005).

Hadid was born and raised in Baghdad, the daughter of a
U.K.-educated industrialist who briefly served as minister of
finance and industry before managing a series of household-goods
factories.

Aunt’s House

The youngest of three children and the only girl, she found
her calling at age 11 when an architect visited her home and
dropped off models of her aunt’s future house. Little Zaha
declared soon afterwards that she wanted to be an architect.

She began her own practice in 1980. Yet her first finished
project came a decade later: the angular Vitra fire station,
next to a furniture factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

Other projects went unrealized, such as the Cardiff Bay
Opera House in Wales, for which she had won the contest in 1982.
In a 2007 interview with Bloomberg News, she blamed the Cardiff
“stigma” for her slim U.K. portfolio.

Her first high-profile U.K. project is the aquatic center
for the 2012 London Olympic Games, which is yet to open.

Hadid, who last visited Iraq in 1980, was recently
appointed to design a new headquarters for the central bank in
Baghdad, after an attack on the existing building left at least
15 people dead.

Making Space

Asked in the 2007 Bloomberg News interview to explain her
passion for architecture, she replied, “I think it’s an
incredible thing to be able to make space. It’s really the next
thing to nature.”

Last year’s Stirling Prize went to the Maggie’s Cancer Care
Centre, by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners (the practice of
Richard Rogers, who co-built Paris’s Pompidou Center). The 2008
winner was the Accordia housing project in Cambridge, England.